Doc Searls Weblog

Photography

• Stephen Lewis in Bubkes: A Tale of Urban Expansion: Late-19th-Century “Çarʂı” Row Houses, Functional Integration, Street-Life, and Class Mobility. ” The downtown end of Pirotska eventually was lined with European-style apartment houses.  At the Üç Bunar end of Pirotska an older form of architecture still dominates: Two-to-three-story row-houses built in çarʂı (Turkish for ‘arcade’ and ‘market’) style, with commercial space for shops and craftsmen’s ateliers on the ground floors and family dwellings on the floor(s) above.  Such çarʂı dwellings contributed to the re-shaping of Sofia by spatially integrating the functions of residential streets and  market quarters.  By doing so, they contributed to a culture of urban street life and the emergence of an urban middle- and lower-middle-class and paths to class mobility, both essential elements of democratic nation-building, an imperfect process in Bulgaria to this very day.”
• At my Flickr stream:
  • New York Skyline over New Jersey on approach to Newark, Revisiting a 2003 conference with @DaveWiner and others, Islay from above, Madrid last month, Tibidabo.

Humans vs. Nature

• Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker:
  • Is it too late to prepare for climate change?
  • Annals of Extinction Part One: The Lost World
  • Annals of Extinction Part Two: The Lost World
  • Head Count
• Her book, The Sixth Extinction
• Democracy Now: The Sixth Extinction: Elizabeth Kolbert on How Humans Are Causing Largest Die-Off Since Dinosaur Age
• Andrew Sullivan: The Extinction We Enabled

Tech

• Dan Blum: Direct Memory Access That Kills
• KevinFitchard in Gigaom: White spaces anyone? Google opens its spectrum database to developers
• Noam Cohen in The New York Times: Wikipedia vs. The Small Screen.
• Cory Doctorow:
  • In The Guardian: What happens with digital rights management in the real world?
  • In BoingBoing: Self-published books: the surprising data from Amazon

The Regulatorium

• Michael J. Copps, in Columbia Journalism Review: From the desk of a former FCC Commissioner: Journalists need to generate a national discussion on the future of the internet
• Kate Cox in The Consumerist: 5 Ways The FCC Has Failed Consumers (And One Way To Fix It), From A Former FCC Commissioner. Expands on the Commissioner’s own post, above, with many links.
• Rick Falkfvinge in TorrentFreak: Because of DRM, the entire copyright monopoly legislation is a lie.

Politics

• On Bill Moyers: David Simon on our rigged political system.
• Everything at Lessig.org.
• Derek Khanna in Forbes: Congress to vote on phone unlocking

Surveillance vs. Privacy

• Kevin S. Bankston and Ashkan Soltani in Yale Law Journal: Tiny Constables and the Cost of Surveillance: Making Cents Out of United States v. Jones. Looks at the Jones decision from the standpoint of data about the costs of location techniques, and forwards a “cost-based conception of the expectation of privacy that both supports and is supported by the concurring opinions in Jones.”
• MIT follows up on the Aaron Swartz case.